Bodycam Appears to Show NYPD Cop Planting Drugs During Traffic Stop

Shocking bodycam footage appears to show the moment an NYPD officer planted weed in a car during a traffic stop.

The footage, obtained by The Intercept, shows a cop searching a vehicle for several minutes, before miraculously "finding" a nug of marijuana by the drinks holder -- despite having already looked there a number of times.

Jason Serrano was a passenger in the car when Staten Island police officers Kyle Erickson and Elmer Pastran pulled it over, citing a broken taillight.

After approaching the car, the officers claimed it smelled like weed, and ordered Serrano and his female driver friend out of the car.

Serrano tried to tell the officer he was recovering from surgery after being stabbed in the abdomen and could barely move, and even lifted his shirt to show him his wound, but is ordered out of the car anyway.

The officer demands Serrano hand over his jacket, but he refuses saying "I'm not getting searched for no reason". The cops then grab him and wrestle him to the ground before handcuffing him, leaving him writhing in pain. He remains there for the rest of the traffic stop, until an ambulance eventually comes to take him to hospital. (He would remain handcuffed there for five days).

Meanwhile, as the officers begin to search the car, Erickson can be heard telling his partner "we need to find something."

But Erickson's search comes up empty-handed; he can even be heard muttering "F--k!" as he fruitlessly rummages.

The camera clearly shows him looking through the center console, and nothing is there.

Erickson appears agitated as he tells his partner "I see nothing?"

"It's alright," Pastran replies.

"You know what I mean?" Erickson asks. "Yeah," comes the reply.

After several more minutes of searching, Erickson can again be heard admitting he hasn't found anything. But 15 seconds later, he returns to the center console cup holder, and can be clearly seen placing something there.

"There's a little bit of weed," he says to himself.

After fiddling with Serrano's jacket out of sight of the camera, the two officers then conclude it had weed flakes all over it.

"There's flakes everywhere though," Pastran says matter-of-factly. "Yeah, no he had weed... you can see there's weed here," Erickson concurs.

At the end of the search, the officers ask each other "you good?" -- before fist-bumping.

Serrano, who was not aware of the footage at the time, ended up pleading guilty as part of a plea deal to avoid jail time.

"There's nothing to say, the video speaks for itself," he said. "I didn't have no marijuana, I had no weed, I had no drugs, I wasn't driving, it wasn't my car, the taillight wasn't broke."

"They had no reason to stop me at all, besides harassment."

He was charged with resisting arrest, obstruction of government administration, unlawful possession of marijuana, and criminal possession of a controlled substance.

"They said I was resisting arrest, but I just didn't want to hit the floor, the only thing I was thinking about was this," he said, referring to his stab-wound surgery. "I still had staples in me... I couldn't even stand up straight."

It wasn't the only time Officers Erickson and Pastran were accused of planting drugs; just weeks before this March 2018 traffic stop, the pair pulled over another teen -- and the conversation recorded between them by their bodycams is very similar to Serrano's arrest.

That footage, obtained by the New York Times, cuts out right before one of the officers "finds" a lit marijuana cigarette on the back seat... even as the driver roars that he's planting something in the car.

Halfway through Erickson's testimony during that case, the judge stopped him and prosecution advised him he might need a lawyer. The charges against that teen, Lasou Kuyateh, were eventually dropped.

An internal investigation found no wrongdoing on the officers' parts. They are both still on patrol.

"The body camera footage in question was captured in a March 13, 2018 arrest that was adjudicated three months later with the defendant pleading guilty to resisting arrest," a spokesman for the Deputy Commissioner for Public Information told TooFab.

"An internal Police Department review of that arrest found no misconduct and the case was closed. In addition, internal investigators at the New York Police Department reviewed every video ever made by both officers involved in the arrest and found no evidence of any serious misconduct."

"Separately, a review committee of the Richmond County district attorney's office found, unanimously, that in no instance had any BWC footage indicated the officer acted criminally."

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